The present disclosure relates to vehicle navigation, and in a more particular example, enhanced vehicle lane merging.
Merging onto freeway is a complicated driving task and often requires cooperation between merging vehicles on the on-ramp and the mainline vehicles on the freeway. It is challenging to regulate merging behaviors of the merging vehicles so that these merging vehicles can merge onto the freeway safely with minimum delay, without interrupting or degrading the flow of freeway traffic. Today, some modern systems rely on vehicle movement monitoring to facilitate the merging behaviors of the merging vehicles. However, these system are generally incapable of improving merging performance of the merging vehicles while limiting the impact of their merging behaviors on flow performance of the mainline traffic. In addition, these existing techniques often require the merging vehicles and the mainline vehicles to be able to communicate with and conform to the control of the systems. Therefore, it is typically impossible for these systems to operate when one or more vehicles travelling on the roads are not provided with these abilities.